Савва Морозов — industrialist / patron с корнями из Russian Empire
Savva Timofeyevich Morozov was born in 1862 at Orekhovo-Zuyevo into the fifth-richest family in the Russian Empire. The dynasty had been founded by his grandfather Savva Vasilyevich Morozov, born a serf, whose Nikolskoye mill was built in 1847 by Ludwig Knoop — the sixth in Knoop's long series and, at the time, treated as a landmark in Russian industrial development. The family were Old Believers, and by Savva Timofeyevich's birth their mills employed tens of thousands.
He read physics, mathematics and chemistry at Moscow University and went on to Cambridge, intending an academic career. His father's failing health brought him home, and in 1887 he took over the family enterprises. He ran them along lines unusual for the period: British machinery, improved ventilation in the sheds, worker housing, medical facilities, schooling and higher wages, which he defended in commercial rather than charitable terms.
He is best remembered as the financial foundation of the Moscow Art Theatre. He was its largest shareholder, paid for the Kamergersky Lane building at a cost of some 300,000 rubles, and underwrote the operations that allowed Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko to work as they did.
He also gave money to the revolutionary movement. He was introduced to it by the Moscow Art Theatre actress Maria Andreeva, later Maxim Gorky's partner, and financed bail and support for arrested and exiled activists, and — by Gorky's account — the Bolshevik paper Iskra. Sergei Witte wrote in his memoirs that Morozov had given the revolutionaries several million rubles. The sums are contested, but the pattern is not: one of the empire's largest industrialists was helping to fund a movement committed to abolishing his own class.
In early 1905 the position collapsed. He asked his mother, who controlled the shares, to transfer the factory rights to him; she refused and had him removed from management entirely. A medical board found acute nervous exhaustion and advised travel abroad. He went to Cannes, and on 13 May 1905 (26 May New Style) he was found dead of a gunshot wound in his apartment there, aged forty-three.
The official finding was suicide. It was questioned almost immediately — the attending doctor doubted the position of the body, his wife reported seeing a man leaving, and notes found at the scene have been read in several ways. No alternative account has ever been established, and the case remains disputed more than a century later. His family's mills were nationalised after 1917 regardless.
Прослеживая корни — Moscow (Russia)
Principal financial backer of the Moscow Art Theatre, and a covert funder of the revolutionary movement. The family firm was founded by his serf-born grandfather Savva Vasilyevich Morozov, whose Nikolskoye mill was built by Ludwig Knoop in 1847.
One of the wealthiest textile industrialists in Russia. The family's first mechanised spinning mill was built in partnership with Ludwig Knoop in 1849.
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Moscow (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.